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Republishing assessed and non-assessed tasks

How to make changes to tasks in active courses for authors.

Michele de Bes avatar
Written by Michele de Bes
Updated over a year ago


When a task is changed in a course that is currently activated, any changes made will be visible to all learners who have not yet seen or started the current task.


The learners who have already made a submission or saved a draft will continue to see the previous version of this task along with the submissions.

When a task with variations is changed in a course, the author can choose to:

  • Only show these variations to learners who have not yet seen or started the current task.

    OR...

  • All learners who have not completed the task will receive a new variation at random. All work in progress will be lost.

Note: If you choose to replace the task for learners who have not yet seen or started the current task, then any existing submissions will be saved for current learners. If you choose to replace the task for all learners, any existing submissions for learners will be removed.

Note: If your task doesn't have variations, then you won't see this pop up.

Do you need to change a task?

Always try to avoid deleting a task element. Removing the element removes learner submissions. Instead, add a new variation to the existing task, then delete the old variation. Learners who have already completed the original variation will still see their original submission (facilitators can see it too) and they can see the new variation if they choose to reset the task (facilitators will need to reset for assessed tasks). If some learners have already attempted the task, we recommend you tell learners about the updates in a talk channel announcement.

Do you need to completely remove a task?

As mentioned above, removing an entire task element removes learner submissions. If you need to do this for learners who have already begun a course, consider warning them first.

Do you need to add a new task?

If learners have already attempted at least one task on the page where you want to add a task, their progress will decrease. For instance, if there were 3 tasks on the page and a learner had completed all 3, their progress would show that page as “complete”, when you add another task, their progress will now say that page is only 75% complete. If learners haven’t attempted any tasks on that page, their progress will be unaffected.

More about progress

Progress is based on how many pages you have completed out of the total. If a page only has text, images, videos etc., then to “complete” that page, learners only need to view it. If a page has tasks on it, to “complete” that page, learners need to have completed every task on the page. If, for example, learners have only completed 1 task of 2 on a page, we give them half of the progress value for that page.

This means that:

  • Changing non-task elements within a page will not affect learners' progress (whether they’ve viewed the page or not)

  • Adding or removing tasks from a page can affect learners' progress (depending on if they’ve already attempted tasks on that page etc.)

Adding or removing entire pages from a course will affect learners' progress.


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